11 facts about time and space that will make you feel so tiny

Since we have yet to secure some “space talk and chill” time with Neil deGrasse Tyson, we’ve been left to our own devices when it comes to digging up a ton of facts about the universe related to time and space that make us feel extremely small — as in, less than microscopic. Seriously, we’ve never felt more insignificant in our lives than the moment we discovered how minor we are relative to the rest of the universe.

So, if the only thing you know about time is how slowly it passes when you’re counting down the days ’til the weekend, then we’re about hit you with some space-related realness that will completely blow your mind.

Prepare to geek out and be humbled by these 11 facts about time and space that will make you realize just how tiny humans are in the grand scheme of things.

2The number of stars in existence is unknown.

Cornell University’s “Ask An Astronomer,” David Kornreich offered an explanation to Space.com that involved enough zeroes to make our eyes cross:

"Kornreich used a very rough estimate of 10 trillion galaxies in the universe. Multiplying that by the Milky Way's estimated 100 billion stars results in a large number indeed: 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars, or a "1" with 24 zeros after it. Kornreich emphasized that number is likely a gross underestimation, as more detailed looks at the universe will show even more galaxies."

3Our sun takes up most of the solar system’s mass.

If you were lucky, your parents raised you to believe that you are a unique, special star (and you *totally* are), but we hate to break it ya: You’re nowhere near as crucial to humankind’s existence as the sun, which accounts for 99 percent of the solar system’s mass. Damn, we are extremely small. Still special though.

4Light from space takes a LONG time to reach Earth.

The speed at which light travels in a vacuum is 186,282 miles per second, which is pretty impressive. But even at that rate, it still takes the light from other stars quite a while to reach planet Earth, which is why looking into space is the same as looking back in time.

On average, it takes sunlight eight minutes and 20 seconds to reach Earth. When you think about how big the distance must be if it takes light — traveling that fast — so much time to get to us, taking up roughly 5-7 feet of space for less than 100 years feels like it barely exists at all.

"In 2005 a team of astrophysicists led by J. Richard Gott of Princeton performed a detailed calculation of the radius of the observable universe. Their answer was 45.7 billion light-years — more than three times bigger than our first, naïve estimate! Within this sphere lie hundreds of billions of galaxies, each with hundreds of billions of stars."

According to NASA, 30 Earth-sized planets could fill up the space between our home planet and its satellite, which lies an average distance of 238,855 miles away. Traveling by car at 60 mph, one could expect to arrive at the moon in half a year’s time.

9 One of Jupiter’s storms is larger than Earth.

"The Great Red Spot is basically the largest storm in the entire solar system," Scott Bolton, principal investigator of NASA's Juno spacecraft, told Newsweek. "It's bigger than the Earth. It was even bigger decades ago. It's very puzzling."

10Mars is home to a volcano that’s three times the size of Mt. Everest.

11Time is only an illusion.

So, are minutes, days, weeks, years and other increments of time measurement only tools made up by humans? That’s what some research suggests, according to physicists who say gravity lacks the strength to push everything in the universe in a forward direction. #mindblown

A ScienceAlert article cites a 2016 paper published in Annalen der Physik that explores the belief that time is all in our heads. One of the study’s authors Robert Lanza writes,

Our paper shows that time doesn’t just exist 'out there' ticking away from past to future, but rather is an emergent property that depends on the observer's ability to preserve information about experienced events."

Whoa. Thanks a lot, time and space! Now we *really* feel tiny and insignificant.